Dr. Conyers Herring, renowned physicist, dies

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Conyers Herring, an internationally known and long-revered professor of solid-state physics at Stanford, died at his Palo Alto home Thursday. He was 94.

To scientists in his field, Dr. Herring was known as a pioneer whose work led to major advances in electronics and who was an inspiration to generations of young physicists in materials science.

He had served on the Stanford faculty since 1978, and for more than 30 years before that he was a research physicist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, where other scientists came to be inspired by his concepts.

"He was without a doubt the leading resource and mentor to most of the creative solid-state scientists in the last half of the century," said Theodore Geballe, a close friend of Dr. Herring and a Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics.

More than a little precocious as a child, Dr. Herring once recalled that when he was only 6 and already reading books far in advance of his age, his parents and teachers determined that he should start school in the fifth grade rather than kindergarten. "It was rugged," he told an interviewer.

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By junior high school, Dr. Herring was trying to decide whether to be an astronomer or an electrical engineer. At 14, he won a scholarship to the University of Kansas, where he majored in astronomy.

Four years later, he began graduate school at Princeton, starting in astrophysics and then switching to the new field of solid-state physics. He earned his doctorate in 1937 under Eugene Wigner, a major figure in the field of quantum mechanics.

Dr. Herring was ready to start his career, but faculty jobs in America were tough to get, and he settled for a two-year research fellowship at MIT. He then took one-year stints as a physics instructor at Princeton and then the University of Missouri.

After the war, he joined Bell Labs, which was becoming increasingly known for supporting research that was far beyond the practical needs of its sponsor, Bell Telephone Co., as a research physicist. There he remained until Stanford recruited him as a professor in 1978.

In the course of his research, Dr. Herring explored virtually every aspect of solid-state physics, which deals with the electronic structure of solids. His findings led to many of the most important developments in materials science and to the technology involved in such products as transistors, digital telephones and computers.

Dr. Herring won many major awards, including the international Wolf Prize in Physics for his contributions to the fundamental theory of solids and the behavior of electrons in metals. He also won the James Murray Luck Award of the National Academy of Sciences.

Throughout his life in science, Dr. Herring remained a religious man and his beliefs about God were strong.

"Things such as truth, goodness, even happiness, are achievable by virtue of a force that is always present in the here and now and available to me personally," he was quoted as saying in a book about science and religion.

Dr. Herring is survived by his wife, Louise; their daughter, Lois Herring of Portland, Ore.; and three sons, Alan of San Jose, Brian of London and Gordon of Tacoma, Wash.